I have just been told by one of our readers that we underestimate one current trend in Web 2.0. He mentioned that many people now have their online presence scattered around the web in blogs, photo and video sharing sites, social networks, etc. And so new services are created that are intended to gather all this content in one place - while Profy rarely pays attention to this trend.

I would not really agree to it: we have mentioned “online profiles aggregators” several times and we have actually given a detailed review of French startup that only recently entered American market Ziki - the one profiles aggregator I actually use myself to combine my online presence if anyone is interested in it (though I rarely visit the website myself for the kind of social networking they offer (it's rather basic and why would I need to network there when I have several profiles in social networks all gathered there?). The most innovative feature about Ziki is that they offer to promote your own name on search engines - so when someone is looking for “Svetlana Gladkova” in Google he or she will see a sponsored link to my profile on Ziki (and it is free for me because I was among early registrants). And somehow Ziki actually generates several hits a day to Profy even without me visiting it or modifying my profile at all.

We also spoke about Profilactic which is one classic example of profiles aggregation that unfortunately I have never been inclined to use after initial testing. This website was launched in public beta in January and is now in what they call “barely 1.0″ - it is still very new and the developers add new features and improvements every few weeks. The unique feature of this website is that it permits you to add friends and follow all their digital content from just one page. I think a really great feature could be ability to import your friends from all those websites you use (in case they use Profilactic, too) - this would have gathered a far larger community of Internet users here and that's what any web w=service needs. But right now the website is in rather basic form - the list of supported websites is rather limited (and personally I would have preferred Flickr integration to Twitter).

And so yesterday I was asked to review a new website that is called ProfileFly and is based on the same idea of aggregation of all your online profiles. I have just created an account there to test currently available features. I have actually found the algorithm of adding new profiles rather complicated: instead of simply providing us with names of available services (categorized as required) they only offer us to choose a category first - possibly to find out that the website you need is absent in this category (for example, I did not find LinkedIn among social networks - only later I found it in the category named “Professional”).